Dear Friends,
Step into my study. Shall I fill you a pipe? Pour you a dram? Excellent!
I recently mentioned to you that the Justin Martyr I met in his writings was not exactly the man I expected to meet. And if you type into your Google search bar, “Did Justin Martyr believe ….” you’ll get a few of those “Google Guesses” where they fill it in for you. For example, did he believe in the Trinity? I clicked on some of the various articles and blog posts on that topic, and mostly what I found made me want to gouge my eyes out.
The people who think he didn’t believe in the Trinity are mostly people who don’t even think the Bible teaches a Trinitarian God. So there is no amount or quality of evidence that would suffice for such a closed-minded person. But this idea, that Justin’s views of the Godhead are deficient in some way (i.e., contrary to Nicene orthodoxy) is a surprisingly widespread one. No less than John Frame, in his indispensable History of Western Philosophy & Theology, accuses Justin of teaching that the Son and Spirit are subordinate beings:
In fact, Justin’s doctrine of creation is like the Gnostic in another way: for him, God does not create the world directly, but brings forth first subordinate beings to accomplish the task. In Justin’s argument, these are the Son and Holy Spirit. The Father cannot get his hands dirty, in effect, by coming into direct contact with matter. (Here the influence of Greek philosophy and/or Gnosticism is evident.) Of course, this idea also distorts the doctrine of the Trinity, for it makes the Son and the Spirit different in nature from the Father and ontologically subordinate to him.
It saddens me to say it, but I think this is insupportable. Frame cites Justin’s Second Apology, 6, but there is nothing there to justify this characterization. It is a perfectly orthodox and biblical statement that the Father created through the Son; nothing about subordination, much less the Father not being able to be in direct contact with matter.
To be sure, Justin’s articulation of the Trinity is not in the Nicene “idiom” (he doesn’t talk about “persons” and “essence”—those are later developments) but he really couldn’t be more clear that the Son is God from all eternity, as is the Spirit. He even uses the analogy that just as a fire is not lessened by kindling another fire, so the Unbegotten Father loses nothing in “begetting” his Son. That’s a favorite Nicene argument for the persons having the very same nature. For Justin, Father, Son, and Spirit are all firmly ensconced on the Creator side of the Creator/creature distinction, and the accusation that he thought the Son and Spirit “subordinate” lackeys is really uncharitable and tenuous. It is even more dubious in light of the fact that in his Dialogue With Trypho, Justin’s money argument, returned to again and again and again, is that the God who is the “I AM who I AM,” the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” who appears to Moses in the burning bush, is the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son. This is not the sort of argument one makes if one has a diminished view of the Son.
Critics like Frame also make far too much, I think, of Justin’s claim that God is “nameless.” It isn’t at all obvious to me that this is a notion borrowed from Greek philosophy; in fact, Justin’s argument in this regard (Second Apology, 6) tends to support the kind of “aseity” of God that Frame would want. Justin’s argument is that to be “named” requires a “namer,” who is someone with a kind of authority to delineate or characterize another. His point seems to be that since God is absolute, there is no higher authority to name him. He must name himself, and so he does, using created things (by way of analogy) to describe his own character—Lord, Father, Creator, etc. And it is this condescension that allows us to name him and speak of him. You will find a very similar line of argument on the opening pages of Bavinck’s Reformed Dogmatics, Volume 2.
Others share Frame’s overall skepticism (granted, appreciative skepticism) of Justin. In fact, I suspect he is here influenced by his mentor, Cornelius Van Til. I should mention that both of these men are mentors of mine—I am a dyed-in-the-wool Van Tilian. But it does no honor to our mentors if we act as though they are beyond criticism. And I have criticisms of Van Til’s portrayal of Justin Martyr in his magisterial book, A Christian Theory of Knowledge.
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